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On Monday night, DeMarcus Cousins shocked the NBA by signing a one – year contract with the Warriors, worth $ 5.3 million. Coming out of a torn Achilles and facing the prospect of concluding a one year deal with a massive reduction, Cousins chose the most opulent version of this timeline. He will spend the next year rehabilitating his value surrounded by defending champions. I'm happy for him. As for everyone, we are now back to the sea of arguments that we were going through during the finals of the NBA. The Warriors will literally start five All-Stars next season, and this development has led to hysteria among fans and the media: Is it ruining the league? Should Adam Silver intervene? Is the NBA broken?
A number of smart people made fun of Monday night's reactions, but I do not know if anxiety should be dismissed so easily. In itself, yes, the Boogie signature is an interesting bet and probably meaningless. The Warriors were going to be overwhelming favorites anyway. Not much has changed. But the news has become a critical point because they have eliminated any pretense about what is possible for the rest of the league next season. In that respect, it reinforced something that has always been reasonable.
It's a week-long vacation, so I'll try to be brief, but the momentary freakout of the Monday night Warriors did not really concern Boogie. It was a reaction to a ladder-wide problem that took place in five stages.
1. The NBA and the Players Association have failed to negotiate an agreement on "ceiling smoothing," an agreement that would have gradually introduced the TV's historic money into the salary cap. It was not difficult to anticipate some problems related to this failure. As Adam Silver said in 2016, "This is going to be disturbing and since I've been part of the league for a long time, I only know that it will disrupt things that we can not even predict. in the last collective agreement. "
2. This huge rise in headlines in 2016 allowed the Warriors to sign Kevin Durant without sacrificing anyone from the core who had won 73 games the year before, so no, that's not the way it was. that the NBA modeled things
.3 The teams that missed Durant felt obliged to spend the top-dollar money on the free agents of the second class.Part of the blame for these decisions lies with the GM negotiating these agreements, but none of this was particularly surprising.When teams have ceiling space, they are rarely responsible for spending it. "Related: Almost all the league foolishly assumed that the salary cap would continue to increase in the following years, thus justifying massive transactions for Timofey Mozgov, Evan Turner and Ian Mahinmi. (And it's not just the silly teams that made mistakes here: if the Houston Rockets did not did not bet big on Ryan Anderson in 2016, Daryl Morey would have had much more room to counter the Warriors this summer.)
4. Players and owners reacted to Durant's decision by negotiating an ABC that would allow teams to pay "supermax" money to retain franchise players, allowing teams like the Thunder to pay $ 41 million per game. year to a player like Russell Westbrook. This money is much more than it could get from anyone else. However, the owners have not negotiated a provision that would allow some of this excess cash to be excluded from the salary cap. This is a problem. Teams like Thunder and Wizards are now at a disadvantage by paying huge sums to keep flawless stars like Westbrook and John Wall. They have kept their stars but they have no place to build around them. (Similar issues arise for teams that retain veteran stars on max bids that pay 30% of the cap and which include larger annual increases than players could find elsewhere.In these cases, teams are often better loties to pay their stars and hope for an exchange six months later.)
5. This summer, most teams do not have ceiling space thanks to the madness of 2016, and Warriors' challengers contenders have no opportunity to improve. Meanwhile, Golden State can take advantage of these same market conditions by attracting All-Star talent at an extreme discount. That's why so many people have been demoralized earlier this week.
None of this is permanent. Twelve months from now, a combination of escalating luxury taxes and expiring agreements could force warriors to break their star core. This will happen just when the ceiling space starts to free around the league. Things will probably start to look normal as early as next July. In addition, a healthy Celtics team could provide a more interesting finale than we saw last June.
Torrey Purvey / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Short-sighted collective bargaining created an environment that made warriors possible while making them useful. much harder for anyone to catch them – as teams spend to retain talent, they lock themselves into mediocrity, and everyone can see it. This Thunder franchise is looking at a payroll that will range between $ 200 and $ 300 million for a list that has no prayer against Golden State next year.
Yes, there is certainly a lot to appreciate in the NBA, no matter who wins the title. In addition, parity is overestimated. It has never been particularly relevant in the NBA. Basketball works best when there are a handful of good teams at the top of the league. All this is an important context for everything "Is the NBA broken?" conversation.
More Context: Most of what people appreciate about the NBA is happening on the internet and is only vaguely linked to watching basketball. Tweets, Instagram, rumors, podcasts, highlights, burner accounts, memes have become a key part of the product. Today's superstars are looking into the drama, and the NBA is terrific at providing fodder for a dozen different types of jokes and arguments. This is the main reason why the league develops in the 21st century. The conversations around professional basketball are always more entertaining than anything else in the sport, and they are tailor made for the internet.
The success of this league in the digital age makes me wonder how much it would increase if the competitive landscape was not so desperate right now. It is naïve to think that "the NBA has always had great teams" provides a satisfactory answer to the concerns of parity. The NBA has always had great teams, but the ideal formula is a system that creates a reasonable balance between big teams and good teams that can challenge them. It is good to admit that at the present time the league has failed.
The Thunder pays a quarter of a billion dollars for a team that is not going anywhere. The best thing that happened to the Jazz is that they could not offer Gordon Hayward a $ 200 million supermax because he was snubbed from an All-NBA team. The worst thing that happened to the Pistons was that Blake Griffin was available. The Rockets are about to become incredibly expensive, and they have already lost a crucial starter from a team that probably reached its ceiling last year.
The Bucks hold on to keep Giannis Antetokounmpo, while the Pelicans do the same with Anthony Davis. Restricted free agents like Clint Capela, Marcus Smart, Jabari Parker and Zach LaVine have virtually no outside market for their services. At least four teams from major markets are building their futures around ceiling space that will probably not make any difference until 2020. Among the 18-34 year olds, this year's finals have the lowest ratings since 2007 . ] LeBron James went to the Lakers 72 hours ago, his new team has a good chance to trade for Kawhi Leonard in the coming weeks, and all we can talk about is if both will have a chance to compete in 18 months. Is the NBA broken?
Of course, the NBA is broken. The best question is how much basketball conversations can make up for the mistakes of the league itself.
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